There is an enormous range of job opportunities in the medical and health care industry - hundreds of different occupations to choose from in both health care practice and business-oriented occupations.
This career profile focuses on opportunities for practitionersóthe general and specialized health care professionals who apply the practice of medicine.
What You'll Do Health care practitioners include everyone from doctors, emergency medical technicians, and physical therapists to physician assistants, radiology technologists, respiratory therapists, optometrists, podiatrists, and speech pathologists. If you're interested in healing people and keeping them healthy, there's almost certainly a job for you somewhere in the health care industry.
What's Going On Perhaps the biggest issue facing those in the health care industry today is the impact of the managed-care approach to health services. Starting in the mid-1970s, in an effort to keep down skyrocketing medical costs, insurance companies started taking a much more active role in the health care industry.
Rather than simply continuing to pay for the treatments prescribed by doctors, who were often in private practice or employed by non-profit hospitals, insurance companies began forming groups such as health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and preferred provider organizations (PPOs) that combined the functions of hospitals and insurance companies.
While there are many different examples of these organizationsóand each has its own set of complex rulesóthey share a common goal: to deliver medical services to their members at reduced rates by giving health care providers incentives to keep costs down. Managed care in its various forms has swelled in popularity as employers have flocked to the cheaper plans, particularly HMOs.
Critics contend that managed-care plans lower the quality of health care by making doctors overly subject to cost constraints. Many charge that the cost savings achieved by managed-care plans come at the expense of patients' health. Others say that managed care is necessary to keep medical cost inflation under control, and to keep health care affordable and accessible to more people.
Both sides of the debate agree that the managed-care system has permanently changed the way medical services are delivered, and that patients and practitioners alike must adapt to the model.
Physicians typically work in clinics, hospitals, or private practices. As managed-care systems have come to dominate the health-services industry, however, doctors have had to learn how to work within the new managed-care structure, which generally means working in some capacity for an HMO or other health network.
Because there are so the many different variations in HMOs and other managed-care plans, doctors are affiliated with them in different ways. Sometimes doctors are hired directly by a managed-care plan as salaried employees. This is known as a staff-model HMO.
It is perhaps more common for doctors to become members of medical groups or independent practice associations (IPAs), which contract their services to a managed-care plan. Depending on the group, a member physician may be a salaried employee (a group-model HMO) or may be in private practice and simply affiliated with the group (an IPA-model HMO).
Compensation
Following are average salary ranges for a sampling of health care professions:
